Trevor Burnham

It’s been an exciting/​intense/​terrifying/​gratifying week for me. It started with a valuable lesson: If you want your blog to get more hits, announce that you’re leaving a PhD program. Responses at SI have been largely warm: “We hate to see you go, but you’ve gotta do what you feel is right”; “You’ve been a terrific person to have in our com­mu­nity”; “You’re launch­ing a startup? That’s so exciting!” That’s been a great relief. Some schools would see a second-​​year dropout as a failed invest­ment. That I haven’t gotten that reaction is a tes­ta­ment to the friendly, positive atmos­phere at SI.

Mean­while, fol­low­ing the The­o­ryville team’s surprise chat with Harj of Y Com­bi­na­tor, we’ve received more and more positive signals. First, we were invited to Tech­Stars for a Day; so, one week from today, Noah and I will be net­work­ing up a storm in Boulder! (Tom had a con­flict­ing oblig­a­tion.) We were named as Momentum MI final­ists, and awarded free summer office space by TechArb, putting us into con­tention for the TechArb Accel­er­a­tor (this year’s suc­ces­sor to the RPM10). We’ve received encour­ag­ing queries from the folks at DreamIt Ventures and BetaSpring. And all the while, we’ve been building our first func­tional demo, set to go online before TS4AD.

On Tuesday, Noah and I had lunch with Dug Song, the central hub of Ann Arbor’s entre­pre­neur­ial ecosys­tem. The guy is a walking gold mine of startup business knowl­edge. The thing he empha­sized most was Paul Graham’s highest prin­ci­ple of startup success: Know your cus­tomers. It’s an obvious rule, but we realized that we haven’t been giving it the priority it deserves. Sure, a working demo is nice, but input from prospec­tive cus­tomers is price­less. We need to fill in the blank in “I’d pay for The­o­ryville if it let me _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​,” and convince investors that there are tens of thou­sands of researchers with that same blank.

We also realized during our con­ver­sa­tion with Dug that a sec­ondary market we’d only been glancing at might actually be our primary market: edu­ca­tion. These days, intro­duc­tory courses on sta­tis­tics are typ­i­cally taught using Stata, SPSS, or R. Many of those students have never written computer code before in their lives, so they’re encoun­ter­ing both pro­gram­ming and sta­tis­tics for the first time—a har­row­ing expe­ri­ence! Wouldn’t it be nice to have a code-​​free envi­ron­ment that could be used for rigorous hands-​​on data analysis in the classroom?

So, our strategy right now: Finish our rough, built-​​in-​​two-​​weeks proof-​​of-​​concept demo (what we’re calling Version 0.01a). Then contact as many poten­tial users as we can (not just the handful of profs and grad students we know per­son­ally) to find out how we can make their research/​teaching simpler, faster, and more fun.

And what about you, dear reader? How might The­o­ryville make your life better?

Tags:   autobiography   startup2 Comments